With the increasing availability of merchandise, products, and other items not only locally, but through a global market, the needs to properly package such materials for shipment and delivery have never been more important. Fortunately, available packaging systems can now be used to produce virtually any style of packaging.
Perhaps the single biggest factor in producing packaging for a product is that the packaging be designed to fit the contained product as precisely as possible. With a more precise fit, the contained item or product not only is less likely to be damaged, but the need for inner packaging is also reduced and possibly eliminated. In particular, when packaging materials such as corrugated cardboard are used to create a box or other packaging design, the materials are creased and folded as near to a right angle possible. Creasing and folding at right angles increases strength characteristics of the packaging materials (essentially exponentially), thereby giving a resulting box a correspondingly increased resistance to damage when stacked.
A standard box has twenty-four right angles making up its rectilinear form. If one or more angles deviates from a right angle by more than a particular tolerance (e.g., even by only a few degrees), other angles can also be compromised and the strength of a resulting box reduced. When strength decreases, the risk of damage or loss to the enclosed item(s) increases. Likewise when packaging fits loosely, similar risks of damage or loss can occur as the sides of the packaging can bow, the corners may sag, and the right angles that make the package strong may be lost.
Using boxes or other packaging that provide a more precise fit can thus provide a dramatic reduction in loss and damage. A more precise fit also produces other significant savings, such as, for example, reducing the amount of material used in producing a box, reducing (and potentially eliminating) inner packaging, reducing postage and handling fees, reducing time at the pack line, and/or increasing transportation yield.
Machinery for constructing a box permits a manufacturer, producer and/or vendor to key in the desired dimensions of the resulting box. The machinery then automatically generates a box template with appropriate cuts and creases. For higher volume items (either single items or collections of items), box sizes are often pre-selected and pre-fabricated since repeated sales and/or storage of such items makes it economically feasible to design a package specific to such item or collection of items.
However, it is often not feasible to pre-select box sizes and/or pre-fabricate boxes for low volume items, specialty items, unique arrangements of items, etc. For example, a retailer operating an online store may receive an order for a wide variety of different items of different sizes, shapes, and configurations, which combination would be virtually impossible to predict beforehand. Such combinations have heretofore made it difficult to produce customized packaging economically, due at least in part to the time needed to arrange and key in a box size for each order that includes multiple items. Accordingly, such effort in designing boxes generally results in various standard sized-boxes rather than custom boxes. Thus, retailers have generally been forced to choose a box from among multiple standard size boxes, and then fill in the gaps within the box with extra packaging materials.